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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Blue Post: Imp Moonkin Form in Cataclysm

As many of you have seen news has been very slow lately. The rumor is that the blues are being very active on the alpha forums, and since most of their development efforts are now focused on the expansion under an NDA there really isn't much they can talk about.

This makes my life as a blogger very difficult. I am struggling for topics to write about. That is why I am pouncing on this little nugget.

At the moment, Shadow has the 5% spell haste buff, similar to Improved Moonkin Form. That could change as we iterate further on the buff and debuff design.

This is in addition to Shadow's existing healing debuff and general priest buffs such as Fortitude.

As posters above have pointed out, we aren't going to give any spec a buff so powerful that they automatically earn a raid spot. (src)

This comment was made by Ghostcrawler after a player questioned the role of Shadow Priests in Cataclysm since much of their utility is being removed or diminshed by changes in design philosophy. I find the comment interesting for two reasons.

In the early version of the Alpha I commented on a month ago, Improved Moonkin Form was completely different then the current live version. The Spirit to Spell Power conversion was gone for obvious reasons, but the 3% Haste buff was gone as well. In it's place was a 6% buff to crit chance.

Given the problems moonkin have with capping haste and that one of our passive bonuses is haste, I wasn't surprised that they were taking haste off of our talents. It just sucked that we were losing a little raid utility. This comment shows that Blizzard is planning to give that utility back.

My guess is that the new Imp Moonkin Form will not stack with the Wrath of Air totem. So, they are giving moonkin the utility back, but they are still reducing the base level of haste moonkin will have.

Overall, this sounds like a Win/Win for moonkin to me. Our base haste levels do shrink so that we benefit from gear haste more at higher levels of gear, but we maintain some of our raid utility.

I am sure some shaman will be upset that other classes providing the Wrath of Air bonus but I've never liked that it was only provided by one class. My guilds have never had tons of shaman available so the 5% haste WoA provided was not necessarily a given every night.

The 3% haste all buff has been completely removed. The only spell haste buff is now 6% from Wrath of Air, Improved Moonkin, and Shadow Priests.

I'm still pissed that we have 7 talent points which we spend on effectively nothing. Oh wait, no, we get 'fun' talents like Fungal Growth, Owlkin Frenzy, Lunar Justice, and Genesis.

This is of course after we already got the 'fun' talents like Brambles, Dreamstate, Euphoria, Celestial Focus (which is just pushback resistance,) Nature's Focus (which is also pushback,)and Natural Shapeshifter

We spend way too many talents on things which don't directly increase our damage. It irks me beyond belief. We're essentially a talent tree that's entirely supported by the new Mastery system. I like the idea behind Mastery and everything, but there's a very fine line between having talents which essentially don't increase DPS at all and the system we have now.